Archive for January, 2006

People seem to still want to make big computers to beat chess masters, while Kasparov has been beaten by the upgraded Deep Blue, then nicknamed Deeper Blue, in 1997. But actually, what’s the point ?
I mean, all it demonstrates is that brutal brute force is better than human. And now human has been beaten, what’s the challenge ?

So, let’s move on a bit and go for a real challenge : beat human at Go. You know, this simple game with simple rules but for which no computer has yet beaten average players. I’m not even saying advanced or masters, because computers are so boring and lame that strong players prefer to play humans.

And if they happen to want to use the brute force as they did for chess, well, they’d need a computer to which Deep(er) Blue would be an abacus.

More seriously, though, why isn’t there more IA research on Go, now that Chess is more or less mastered ? Another thing that puzzles me is how come gnugo is so good compared to other Go programs, while free software Chess programs are so lame ?

If you’re selling anything, there are three kinds of people out there: those who will buy from you, those who might buy from you, and those who will never buy from you. It’s not cost-effective to try to shut down the third group, and there’s a word for unpaid use by the second group: “marketing”.